Tethered space mission systems have long been used to maintain coupling between two space objects. In the early Apollo missions, astronauts were tethered to a mother orbiting spacecraft through the use of an tethering umbilical cord. The astronauts would operate hand held thrusters while floating in free space but with attachment to the spacecraft. The thrusters could allow and astronauts to be imprecisely positioned relative to and from the mother spacecraft. With the advent of the space shuttle, elongated mechanical arms under robotic control could deploy a payload, such as the Hubbell Telescope, at a position from the Shuttle. Such mechanical arms were especially adapted for mated coupling and release to the payload. These mechanical arms need not require precise remote position, nor precise dynamic control of the mechanical arm motion, as the mechanical arm served merely to deploy the payload into a desired orbit with a gross positioning margin from the spacecraft.
More recent space missions have sought to deploy a plurality of spacecraft in precise relative positions from each others. Tethering one spacecraft to another can be used for various applications, such as space interferometry. The so-called ProSEDS mission deployed a pair of tethered masses to explore on-orbit tether dynamics. Means are required to maintain a tension force in the tether in order to avoid tether collapse and uncontrolled oscillations. These means involve whirling to achieve centrifugal force, or gravity gradient stabilization. Plans for a space-based interferometer are considering centrifugally stabilized interferometer nodes separated by a long tether. Such systems are vulnerable to oscillation and collapse of the flexible tether, and to persisting libration motions. The present concept deploys a tether with inherent stiffness, that resists collapse, and therefore will not require whirling or centrifugal force for stability. On-orbit flight mechanics of tethered systems will be simplified by having a rigidized tether, allowing the combination of masses to be repositioned and stabilized, even if temporary overloads may cause tether buckling, since the natural, non-linear state of the tether stiffness is to revert to a stable straight orientation. The non-linear character of the tether, from buckled to straight orientation, also contributes to recovery of a straight stable configuration. Additonally, the present configuration enables the adjustable reposition of a central mass, that could be one element of a space interferometer, along the rigidized tether, while the total tether length remains constant and stable. Such tethered system disadvantageously suffer from slacking instabilities, undesirable mechanical resonant motion during dynamic motion of the tethered component, and uneven centrifugal forces. Such systems are characterized as experiencing partial tether collapse, slacking instabilities, and loss of tension between the two tethered spacecraft that prevents continuous precise tethered positioning. Particularly, these tethered systems experience whirl instabilities of centrifugal forces between two spacecraft rotating about each other producing imprecise tethered positioning. These and other disadvantages are solved or reduced using the invention.